Through funding freezes, regulatory threats, and legal manipulation, the Trump administration is pressuring nonprofit organizations to fall in line—or face extinction.
By Jackie Vickery
The White House is implementing a range of policies and executive actions to reshape the relationship between the federal government and America’s nonprofit sector. Past administrations, whether Republican or Democratic, have recognized that nongovernmental organizations strengthen American democracy and communities nationwide. But the current administration has abandoned this consensus, instead viewing any organization that does not explicitly support its agenda as inherently suspicious and potentially dangerous.
The Trump administration operates from a fundamentally different worldview than its predecessors. International relations are now seen as competitive arenas where nations and organizations compete for advantage, dismissing shared values as meaningless and treating alliances as nothing more than temporary alignments of interest. This zero-sum framework extends to domestic policy as well. Under this logic, any institution not explicitly aligned with the administration’s agenda becomes suspect. The “America First” banner has thus become a lens through which humanitarian organizations, public media outlets, and advocacy groups are reframed from community partners into potential threats to national priorities.
“Sovereignty on Steroids”
Stewart Patrick, senior fellow and director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that the administration has embraced a mindset of “sovereignty on steroids,” stating, “Trump perceives and indeed welcomes a cutthroat world in which norms and rules mean nothing, all relationships are transactional, and outcomes ultimately reflect the naked exercise of power. … ‘Global leadership’ is not in his lexicon.”
President Trump wasted no time as he began his second term in office, as on Inauguration Day, he issued his first executive order targeting nonprofits. Titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” the order implemented a sweeping ninety-day suspension of US foreign development assistance, immediately terminating more than $10 billion in funding to organizations worldwide. In a statement on the order, the Charity & Security Network called the elimination of USAID and foreign aid “far more than a political and policy decision, it is nothing less than a fundamental and existential threat to a broad scope of critical nonprofit programs.”
The administration’s actions expanded over the following week when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memorandum mandating a temporary pause on all federal financial assistance — approximately $3 trillion, representing roughly 30 percent of total federal expenditures. The freeze encompassed foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, so-called “woke” gender ideology programs, and initiatives related to the “Green New Deal.”
Although the blanket pause was formally rescinded on January 29, 2025, following a federal judge’s temporary restraining order, more targeted funding reductions continued through other channels. President Trump’s subsequent discretionary funding request for Fiscal Year 2026, also referred to as the “skinny budget,” reflected and formalized this approach by proposing a 22.6 percent ($163 billion) reduction in domestic discretionary spending. The administration justified these cuts as a means to eliminate programs deemed “woke and weaponized against ordinary working Americans,” “wasteful,” or best managed at the state and local levels.
The Propaganda Playbook
At the center of this campaign sits the administration’s war on “woke” ideology and DEI initiatives. The Trump administration weaponized language itself. Terms like “woke” and “DEI” have been stripped of their original meanings and transformed into politically charged rhetorical instruments aimed at delegitimizing the mission of these organizations. Olivia Riggio, Media Analyst and Administrative and Fundraising Director at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), shared with Project Censored that, “‘Woke’ is a term that’s been around since maybe the thirties and was used in black communities to mean ‘be aware of who’s around you.’ The administration has totally divorced that term from its original meaning to demonize any ideology that shakes up the status quo.”
Riggio broke down what the targeted concepts actually mean:
All “diversity” means is that you got a bunch of different people from different backgrounds and different experiences working together. All ‘equity’ means is that everyone gets an equal shot. All ‘inclusion’ means is that everyone who’s qualified gets to be part of something, regardless of what their background is.
The Trump administration’s linguistic manipulation has a deliberate, strategic purpose. By subverting the meaning of commonly understood terms, the administration creates indefinite categories that can encompass virtually any organization or policy it opposes. The tactic enables officials to avoid engaging with the substance of programs and instead dismiss and discredit them through loaded terminology that triggers negative emotional responses among supporters. Once a program is labeled “woke” or positioned under the DEI umbrella, it becomes a target regardless of its actual impact or purpose.
Lisa Graves, Executive Director of True North Research, told Project Censored that the Trump administration deliberately uses the acronym “DEI” rather than the full phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as part of a broader strategy to vilify nonprofit sector policies and create a convenient target for attacking workplace inclusion initiatives. Graves characterized the administration’s approach as an ideological “witch hunt” that actually weakens US security rather than strengthening it. “Those are actually decisions that make America less safe,” she explained, calling the Trump administration’s DEI-related policies “destructive to our national security.”
The administration’s rhetoric undermines the essential purposes of nonprofit programs by using incendiary language that recasts evidence-based policy initiatives as ideological threats. The January 2025 executive order employs classic propaganda techniques by portraying foreign aid as un-American and claiming such programs destabilize global relations through “disruptive ideologies,” effectively reframing all humanitarian assistance and development work as inherently subversive. By presenting legitimate programs as bureaucratic overreach imposed by unelected officials, this approach erodes public understanding of how civil society organizations and government programs collaborate to address pressing social challenges and protect vulnerable populations both domestically and internationally.
The Terrorism Smear Campaign
Trump’s assault on the nonprofit sector operates through sophisticated legal instruments designed to bypass traditional due process protections. The “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” dubbed the “nonprofit killer bill” by opponents, exemplifies this approach. Although the legislation initially garnered bipartisan support for its provisions to help US hostages, House Democrats blocked the passage on November 13, 2024, citing concerns about the incoming Trump administration’s potential abuse of the bill’s broader powers, but they caved eight days later and the House passed its version of the legislation, with its most dangerous provision intact, granting the Treasury Secretary unilateral authority to designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status within ninety days. Riggio told Project Censored that the bill’s rhetorical framing is deliberately crafted to maximize governmental control, “The language is obscure and unspecific on purpose. Therefore, the executive branch can just decide what it wants to determine as a terrorist supporting organization.”
First Amendment lawyer Seth Stern, Director of Advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Project Censored that “this bill would allow nonprofits to be harassed and even shut down without due process.” His concerns reflect the bill’s troubling lack of procedural safeguards: it lacks an evidentiary standard for designations, allows the use of “classified information” that cannot be reviewed or challenged by the accused nonprofit in court, and offers no clear due process for regaining status beyond a ninety-day appeal period. The Charity & Security Network echoed these concerns, describing the legislation as “redundant and unnecessary” given existing anti-terrorism laws and warning it could become “a tool that may be manipulated against nonprofit organizations by bad actors with political motives.”
Perhaps more insidious than the nonprofit killer bill is the Trump administration’s increased scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of 501(c)(3) organizations, particularly those involved in areas deemed politically contentious. The administration’s approach leverages the “illegality doctrine” — a principle stating that an organization will not qualify for tax-exempt status if its purposes are illegal or violate public policy, or if it engages in activities that substantially violate public policy or are unlawful. By redefining what constitutes “illegal” activities, officials can target nonprofits involved in advocacy for Palestine, DEI programming, immigration assistance, or environmental campaigns, ultimately threatening not only any federal funding these groups receive but also their tax-exempt status. The power of this approach lies in its elasticity: Washington can broadly define activities as potentially illegal and threaten virtually any organization that challenges its agenda. Beyond losing their 501(c)(3) status, these organizations simultaneously face cuts to federal grants that often comprise a large portion of their operating budgets, resulting in a severe financial strain that can force them to scale back services or shut down entirely.
Manufacturing Submission Through Terror
The Trump administration’s strategy operates as much through intimidation as through direct action. The mere possibility of losing tax-exempt status or federal funding forces organizations to engage in self-censorship and risk assessments that fundamentally alter their operations. Riggio told Project Censored that the underlying motivation behind the administration’s campaign stems from the ruling class’s fear of losing power, describing it as a “last-ditch effort to stay empowered” in the face of mounting challenges to the status quo. Riggio explained that strategy follows “a page out of the fascist playbook,” noting that authoritarians deliberately restrict access to reliable information by targeting media, academia, and other democratic institutions that serve as “incubators of dissent.” The broader strategy of the Trump administration’s campaign encompasses what Riggio described as manufacturing consent through information control. “When you have a public that’s in the dark, you can manufacture consent for all different types of things,” she told Project Censored.
Graves said that we are witnessing the impacts of a political culture in which citizens have become more devoted to personal loyalty to a leader than to constitutional principles or the rule of law, making such citizens “impervious to facts and narratives that contradict the lies and the manufacturing of a faux reality.”
The administration’s campaign to defund and threaten nonprofits affects more than individual organizations. Graves argued that this is a coordinated effort to weaken nonprofit independence while expanding government power to target civil society organizations that benefit communities nationwide.
When Authority Faces No Opposition
The Trump administration’s war on nonprofits constitutes far more than a policy preference, ideological disagreement, or conventional partisan conflict over budget priorities. It is a calculated agenda to concentrate power by weakening the independent institutions that serve as democracy’s immune system against authoritarian overreach. The long-term ramifications of these federal funding cuts will extend well beyond any single election cycle, inherently altering the landscape of US civil society in ways that may prove extraordinarily difficult to reverse once the damage is done.
Jackie Vickery served as a summer 2025 intern for Project Censored. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism at Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications and is expected to graduate in May 2026.
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